


Liontaming

by cosmogyral



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Royalty, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Other, Politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-21
Updated: 2011-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:02:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thirteen-year-old Queen Regnant of France outpaces her retinue into the courtyard, her long black mourning streaming behind her, and Rose hates her on sight. It makes her smile.</p><p>Lion in Winter fusion. Caveat lector: this will probably never be completed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Liontaming

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I'm really sorry about this, but this is not the fic I wrote on the forums for this fusion, and it is not a fic that is likely to ever be finished -- it's just being jossed to death with the characterizations of Mom and Jake (not to mention that Jacob is, I'm sorry, a name utterly unmakable into the name of a medieval English king.) BUT. Here is the first half of a Lion in Winter fusion because I wrote this thing to death and I'd like to pretend that if I post it, I might ever do the rest of it.
> 
> YES THIS IS A GOOD ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS FIC, YOU SHOULD ALL READ IT

The thirteen-year-old Queen Regnant of France outpaces her retinue into the courtyard, her long black mourning streaming behind her, and Rose hates her on sight. It makes her smile where she stands next to David, his thumb running over the hilt of his sword; it makes her mother smile, too, and tangle her hand in Rose's hair, disarranging the circlet of topaz. Rose is saved the trouble of inventing some excuse to fix it by David's huff of impatience as he leans over to do it for her.

"Sixpence on a reminder before dinner," he murmurs, tucking a stone behind her ear.

"A sucker's bet," Rose says, complacently. "Get your fingers out of my metaphor, the queen is ravening to pay us official notice."

She is, actually, queen of France or no. Having decorously embraced their stepfather the king of England she is now practically buzzing with the effort of not greeting them yet. Rose has a sudden flash of memory, Jade in her father's skirts before the third march to Jerusalem, a sprint and a laugh. The queen has lost the sprint with her ascension to the throne, but as Rose meets her eyes and goes into her curtsey she lets out the laugh whole-heartedly. "Sister," she says, and pulls Rose into an actual hug. "I cannot _believe_ that we are finally to meet at last."

"It does, indeed, have an air of surreality about it," Rose says. "Even an air of fable. The wayward children of the house Harley--"

"Forgive my half-sister," David says. He bows from the knee, and lets Jade raise him up. "She decided at the age of five that she would never let a single moment go by without anatomizing it."

"And my _half-_ brother, without setting it to rhyme," Rose says, dryly. "He has none of the true French in him, your majesty, just my mother's Normandy and my stepfather's Norman. I think it led to a tragic--"

"Rose!" It's John, at a run, and he sweeps her off the feet with the force of his welcome. "God's wounds, Rose! It's been an age. You have to interrupt them," he tells Jade, "or they'll keep talking until the house comes down."

Oh, Lord, he's tall. Half a foot at least. He must have picked it up as guarantor of the peace with France, but if bluster and occasional tournaments make you grow then David is due a yard. She leans in close to murmur, "That was nearly acceptable. How long have you rehearsed it?"

"All the way from Paris," he says, with evident delight. "I've been squirreling them away against the winter. Did you get your mother those horns?"

"I commissioned them myself. She hasn't given me a gift yet except the yearly distillation." The horns are gold, woven with golden laurel, curving forward over each ear, and they make her mother look not like the Condesce in a mosaic but perhaps like one of her junior ministers. Her mother is wearing a rather ministerial look to go with it, and a gaze so fixed on the king that Rose knows she's begun to listen to every word her children say.

"We can share it." John claps her on the shoulder. "The four of us and a bottle of juniper wine."

Oh, God. "John--"

"I don't know if Jade drinks your mother's concoctions! Do you think she'd be willing to investigate?"

" _John--_ "

"--because I think she might be more interested in coming up with weird toasts than--"

"What an excellent idea," Rose says, with force. "What shall we toast? You and Jade or your stolen crowns?"

John flinches, and ah, yes, _now_ he remembers: the scions of House Egbert and House Lalonde under their proud parents' eyes. She smiles again, a smaller and more self-contained smile, just to see him try to match it. He runs a hand through his hair. "I thought," he says, "because it's Christmas…"

"Because it's Christmas," she says, "I'm warning you in advance."

If she were squeamish, she would not still be the duchess of three provinces. She's still glad when her mother moves away from the king, smiling her cat's smile at the look on John's face, and says, "The King of England would like to dine. Rosie, would you take the queen's arm? You were the most diligent with your Parisian French, I recall."

Rose and David exchange a glance. Hers says, _I told you about the bet._ His, _Damn, I gotta use that one._

* * *

Dinner is, by family custom, a time when the knives are saved for the fowl. Rose sits on Jade's right and answers all of her questions, about the sweetmeats and the servants and the indigo-bloods who still live and pray in the forest. After her mother's sally she makes sure that her Parisian French is fucking _superlative_ , and Jade seems quite happy in it until John dives into the conversation with his own idiolect, the vowels from the south and the consonants classical and half the words in English, and Jade laughs and asks if a _hound_ is different than a _dog_ , and if either of them actually have anything to do with John's story about the winter of seventy-one, and then the conversation turns into a rapid-fire incomprehensible recitation of the story of Jesus and the Sufferer.

Rose sits with her hands folded tightly in her lap, and decides it's to fend off the advances of Jade's white hound.

"Becquerel," Jade says, after dinner. She kneels in the rushes. "His name is Becquerel. Bec, shake."

Rose stares down at it. "I am not in the habit of making an acquaintance with a _lusus naturae_ ," she says, cautiously.

"Oh, Bec's a fleethound, he's on our crests," Jade says, stroking him behind the ears. "Nothing wonderful about him. Except how _wonderful he is,_ aren't you? Yes you are, boy."

Except the fact that he comes up almost to Rose's shoulder, and looks at her with sightless, nightmare eyes. "What does he eat?"

"Well, he got really hungry in July," Jade says, brightly. "Are John and David going to fight? John says they always do, and he always wins. I'll meet you in the courtyard!"

"Did she just make a joke about her hound eating her dead father?" David asks, for information, as Jade sprints for the door.

"She's still the Queen of France and you can't sleep with her," Rose says, warningly, but as usual it has no effect.

John and David start talking down each others' courage as soon as they begin speaking to each other in earnest. They use their old wasters for the fight and David, when he turns to dedicate it to Rose, is struck from behind right away. He's too surprised to get self-important. "Never mind," he calls to Rose, as he whirls. "You don't dedicate a massacre anyway."

Last year they fought like children, and John tripped him to get his sword at his throat. It's been a long year. David has been traveling and Rose sees it in his arms, in the way he paces around John, his visor doing the work of hiding his worst tells. He lunges and John skips back-- faster, as well as stronger, and she doesn't know why he brings his sword straight into David's block but she can tell from his open smile that _he_ does. Something fancy with the footwork, an overhanded chase, a strike to David's arm which makes him yelp. It leaves the crook of his shoulder wide open but David doesn't deign to approach.

"It's his sword," Jade says, suddenly. She's watching with an avid and professional interest. "The wood makes the balance totally wrong! He's used to an estoc, a what do you call it, a tuck?"

"That's what he insists on calling it, yes." David gets in another solid thrust to the rib, but John just dances back. He says something Rose can't make out. "How can you tell?"

Jade points. "Because he thinks he can skewer John with the waster. He keeps giving up on the cheap shots, see? He wants to do a two-handed thrust to the heart. You can only do that with an estoc really. That's how he killed that man in Roissy," she adds, a little starry-eyed. "There was a poem about it. _Tear him to pieces!_ "

John is pressing his advantage, landing solid and painful hits on each of David's limbs in quick succession, and David is reduced to an inelegant backstep, pressing up against the wall of the courtyard and then using the roughness of the stone to allow a sort of leap from the wall that makes him look like a giant red lizard. For a moment he's going to do something glorious, and then, by the general laws of the world, he hits the steps and tumbles to a halt at John's feet. John puts his foot on David's stomach and slams the sword between David's shoulder and rib. He's panting. "Yield."

"But I don't want to," David says, his visor comedically still down.

"Robbed!" their mother says to the king, with inappropriate fervor. "Robbed of a victory! Your heir is a cheat and a half."

"Jade," Rose says, as David takes John's hand. "Forgive me for my ignorance. There's something called a 'crown guard', isn't there?"

"Oh, sure," Jade says. "It's a high center guard, like--" She demonstrates. "David started out with it."

"Of course he did," Rose sighs, and goes to clean up the mess.

* * *

It's evening before Rose is free of them, her mother, her father, the steward with a question about the bedding, even David with his damned lute. She's searching for somewhere quiet to read when she hears John's voice, reedy like it always is when he's alone and doesn't have anyone to prove his kingliness too. She follows it. John is singing, and as she turns a corner she sees him, his hands dancing on the table in the Great Hall. " _My true love walks in white and grey,  
She waits the fall of night.  
She knows me like the psalms of God,  
She lost me with the light._

 _My true love she will take my hand,  
and we will ride the sea.  
For there's no loving left on land_…

Damn!" He frowns. " _For there's no loving left on land_ \--"

" _And there's no life in me,_ " Rose suggests, coming from the door. "You still have an undying love for undeathless verse."

"That's _plenty_ deathless," John protests. His thumbnail catches on the grain. "The Quadratic Verses are classical, anyway. You like the classics."

Rose tilts her head. "I apologize. I'd forgotten that there's nothing more classical than two humans confusing eros and philia."

"Fine." John ducks under the table and comes up with something in purple brocade. "If you don't appreciate the classics, I am definitely keeping this present all to myself."

"John!" Rose dives for it. "Don't you dare!"

He holds it out of reach. "Haha, no way! This is for the civilized people _only._ What would Alhacen say?"

"You can't have got me Alhacen," Rose says. If she leans over his shoulder she thinks she can probably reach the cord. "No one's translating Alhacen."

"Bint Maryam is," John says. He grins at her. "I bought 'em in a lot. Do you know how many books about astronomy he even wrote? No no no no no--" and then a strangled shriek as his chair goes over and they land in a tangle of limbs, brocade, and blessed, blessed book. She gets decorously off him before looking at the cover, which is Alternian in John's shaky hand. Alhacen's _Treatise on the Influence of Melodies on the Souls of Animals_. Underneath in English he has added _By an uncertain scribe._

"It's pretty great," he says. "Isn't it?"

 _Muvafhak has written that music is of great use in the treatment of those madnesses which arise from a confusion of souls,_ Alhacen writes, and bint Maryam translates, and John transcribes. _When a mating fondness comes upon a man and the black bile is burning in him till he is sick with love, a singer can sometimes bring the bile forth without any bleeding at all. It is for this reason the Condesce kept a stable of piper physicians, for she claimed that any human she allowed in her sight would be overcome with an eros and die at her feet without them._

John's hand on her shoulder makes her flinch, and she nearly drops the book. She stands to cover the lapse. "There isn't a single demon in this," she says. "You would think the infidel would at least have an _interesting_ wrong idea of the mad."

"Is this the part where you pretend you don't like it?" John says. He isn't getting up. He isn't looking at her, either. "Because honestly I would kind of prefer it if we skipped that this year."

"Yes, you're right." Rose snaps the book shut. "Let's skip straight to the good part. The kitchen fire's lit; shall you go first, or Jade? Mother has the skewers all ready. She sharpens them all year, John, as soon as you leave for the wide world. I hold the whetstone. Sometimes, if we're really _very_ lucky, a visitor will come with some little fragment of news or a gift of charity and we have the opportunity to test them."

John sits up enough to wrap his arms around his knees. "Well, that sounds dull," he says. "You could write."

"I do write," Rose says. "And mother reads."

"I meant letters to France."

"And then we could be arrested for treason."

"You're already arrested for treason," John points out. "What would he do, disinherit you? And he won't arrest me."

"If it put David on the throne? Please. He'd have you in our Castle Dolorous before Christmas next."

"Fine," John says, rebelliously. Not a look that suits him. "Fine! More like Castle Dolorosa."

Rose is put off her repartee. Cautiously: "Did you just--"

"Shut up."

"But the Dolorosa was famously gentle and kind--"

"I said--"

"--and _virginal_ besides--"

He laughs, helplessly, and drops his head between his knees. "Jesu, Rose, everyone from here to Constantinople knows you're still virginal."

"This wouldn't have anything to do with a certain wandering troubadour and knight, would it?" Rose asks. "Because if so, I have a brother to murder."

"Hey, now." God knows how long David's been in the doorway, except that 'long enough to be embarrassing' is a longstanding modus operandi of his. "I write the most respectful lyrics. They're all 'lady in her winding tower' and 'sister bound by the eagle's claw'. St. Lucy has nothing on you. People are starting to talk about your miracles already."

"I did feel a little faint in June," Rose muses. "I must have been in Dorchester saving a child."

"You kept that child right out of smallpox," David confirms. "She was wailing like a banshee and you tapped her on the forehead and told her she'd be okay if she feared God and sacrificed a few goats to the demons of mirth and boom, no pox. Clean as the Sufferer's ass."

"I see," Rose agrees. "So you did write songs about my unsullied sheets, and then you committed two pantheons' worth of blasphemy."

"I-- Well, a couple," David says. "If it helps, they were hits."

"Everyone loved the Lay of the Rose Garden," John scoots to the left, and David sits down in the chair. "I could do all of them right now if you want. 'My sister's pure as snow, but you can totally sleep with me, baby, too loo too lay.'" He strums an imaginary lute. "'My brother isn't getting any, and also let me under your skirts, too loo too lay.'"

"Refrains are for chumps. If I too loo too layed I'd stick them all on the end in the row and really wow the audience."

"Yeah," John says, dubiously, "but then nobody would sleep with you or marry Rose at all."

"I think I'd make you a grand husband," Jade says, from the doorway, and beams at their confusion. "Rose, would you do me a favor, my hair's unmanageable and I've sent a servant into hysterics already."

"Braids?" Rose asks, interested. "I'll give it my all."

"Goodnight," the brothers chorus, and then frown at each other.

* * *

She did some of the tapestries that adorn Jade's room herself, and she touches one of them as she enters the room, a hunting scene. "I like this one," she comments. "I enjoyed all the reds."

"It's exciting," Jade says, twirling. "It's all exciting. England is a country of wonders. Oh -- fie on this," she says, extracting a hairpin, and holds it up to Rose in mute supplication.

"Sit down," says Rose, firmly, and begins to untangle Jade's hair. It takes a long time, it seems, five minutes stretching into ten, silent and meditative. Jade seems to have an enormous amount of hair, more than is necessary. Surely she cut it all off when her father died, not so long ago.

As if reading her mind, Jade said, "I wanted to shear it off for the funeral but the court wouldn't have it. They said I'd spring out like a sheep and that it wasn't proper. It'll hardly hold a crown, though. I don't know _how_ the Condesce managed it between the horns and the hair."

"The Condesce's circlet hooked on in the back," says Rose, gathering up three cords of hair. She considers using the brush, then decides against it, and moves instead to a glass of water on the bedside table, which she dips the comb in. "I always wondered about Cordelia, myself."

"Is she from the Matter of Britain?" Jade asks uncertainly. She glances back at Rose and Rose nearly loses her stranglehold on the flyaway hair. "I haven't really learnt it. John tells me bits of it when we meet, but it's mostly Arthur."

It takes all of Rose's limited self-control not to yank Jade's hair at this, which is a thought of such surpassing childishness that it restores her good humor at once. "I'm not surprised. This story's a touchy subject with him." She chases a curl. "Cordelia was the youngest daughter of King Leir. This was a time after the Landing, you understand, in the misty years between the death of the Condesce and the conquest of William. I think the historian didn't want to be pinned down into the depressing vicissitudes of fact. In any case, Leir asked all three of his daughters to give an accurate accounting of their love for him."

A troubadour had sung her this story first, and then she had read it in the histories, but when they had at last fled the sheltering, strangling protection of Henry's arms to lead their little dilettante of a revolution, her mother had told it to them again. _My Goneril. My Regan,_ she'd said, affectionately carding through Rose's short new hair. _This was going a little far with your flattery, don't you think?_

"Goneril and Regan had good answers." Honestly, the queen of France is a walking snarl. "I believe one was as deep as the sea and the other was as wide as the sky, but I _may_ be confusing it with David's effusions about it. Cordelia had nothing of the kind and was a terrible liar besides, and so the king cast her off. She wandered the North Sea in blank despair, and the Prince of it rose out of the water and offered her his hand."

"Ohhhh." Jade wrinkles her nose. "I hate those stories."

Rose pauses in her braid. "Really? I imagined you'd enjoy the romances."

Jade shakes her head. "Some of them, if there's swordfighting. Or gardening," she says, conscientiously. "But not the ones with a princess on one end. She married the Prince of the Sea?"

"Yes, and ruled it, which is the part that baffles the historians," Rose says. "There's a theory that she might have drowned and ruled it dead. David wrote a poem about _that_ , too. Anyway, the king grows old as all kings do, and goes to Goneril and Regan for help. But they were only flattering him, of course, and so they leave him to freeze to death on the moors. Which makes him very angry, as all kings are. He raises an army."

"Oh -- does Cordelia fight with him? She walks the fields of war, right?" Jade says, twisting around. "A wolf behind, a crow before? Wow, David must be really into her."

"He only wrote three songs about her," Rose says. "One for each of us." A Cordelia virginal, a Cordelia in battle, a Cordelia dead and king. "John didn't care for his. Or mine, actually."

Jade frowns. "I can see why. The king still loves you."

Rose examines the queen's guileless face. "Do you think so?"

"Sure." Jade lifts a shoulder. "He hasn't disinherited you and you've done all _kinds_ of treason."

"Oh." Rose is bizarrely disappointed. She guides Jade's head back around. "No. That's nothing at all to do with love. And that's not why John doesn't like Cordelia."

"Why?" Jade demands. "Is he squeamish about the blood?"

Rose laughs. "Maybe," she allows. "But he doesn't like Cordelia because he's squeamish about his _own_ blood, Jade. Either way, the way David tells it, when Cordelia came back to rule the kingdom she came back dead and a half. John would prefer to get his rightful stranglehold on England while he's alive."

There's a silence in the room, save for the crackling of the fire. Jade says, finally, "Okay, maybe I'm the one being squeamish now, but it makes me a little bit uncomfortable to have my hair done by someone who's threatening a murder."

"Then you're in luck," Rose says. She ties it off. "I am, in fact, done."

Jade turns again to look at her. She has striking eyes, the queen of France. They're the same color as the king of England's. Rose holds the brush between the two of them, hoping to God that her smile is as sober as she's trained it to be, and waits for Jade's offer or her threat.

Instead there's a knock, and John's voice in a whisper: "Jade? Are you alone?"


End file.
